by James Salter
while the radar station gave them another steer, still one hundred and seventy degrees, ninety-five miles.
“How are you doing, Three?”
“Forty-two gallons.”
“Roger.”
The ships, not far apart, could do nothing to affect one
another though they shared a common fate. There was no
need to speak. Silent minutes passed. The gallons fell away.
“Milkman, Maple Lead. Where do you have us now?”
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g o d s o f t i n
“Stand by one, Maple Lead. We have you . . . steer one eight zero to home plate, sixty-six nautical miles.”
“Roger. Sixty-six out. Will you inform K-2 that we’re in
the soup, low on fuel? We’ll be declaring an emergency.” Then, to the element leader, “What do you have, Three?”
“Twenty-four gallons.”
That was six or seven minutes of flying at altitude, throt-
tled back to minimum cruise, but they also had to let down,
make an approach, line up with the runway if they could find it. The heads in the cockpits were motionless, as if nothing of interest were going on, but they were facing the unalterable.
The wingmen might have even less fuel than the element
leader. After a while the flight leader called again, “Milkman, Maple. How far are we out?”
“We have you thirty-four miles out, Maple flight.”
“Roger.” He looked over at the element leader, who was
perhaps fifty feet away. “What do you have now, Brax?”
“I’ve got nine hundred ninety-eight gallons, buddy,” the
reply came calmly.
Not long afterwards, one by one, they ran out of fuel. The
entire flight dead-sticked onto the runway at K-2.
It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to
be talked about and admired. It was not impossible—the
world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred’s, a
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39
horse that ran and won.
m
My closet friend in the squadron, a classmate, had hair flecked with gray and a wry way of talking that I liked. William Wood was his name. He was older—he’d been perhaps twenty when
we became cadets, and afterwards had gone right into fighters; he’d been in them since the beginning. He was relaxed and
could be very droll.
Early that winter, he and I went to Korea. We had eagerly
read—it passed from hand to hand—the first definitive report, a sort of letter about the enemy airplanes that had suddenly appeared in the war, Russian planes, MIG-15s, and when the
chance came, like men running to a claims office, we had raced to volunteer. There were two openings that month and we got
them. It was not only the report, the war itself was whispering an invitation: Meet me. Whatever we were, we felt inauthen-tic. You were not anything unless you had fought.
II.
The Korean War began suddenly in June 1950 when North
Korea attacked the South across a line that had divided the country—much as East and West Germany had been
divided—since the end of the Second World War in 1945.
North Korea was in the Communist sphere. The South was
relatively democratic and free.
General MacArthur, who had been presiding over the
American occupation of Japan nearby, brilliantly constructed victory from what seemed disaster in Korea and swept the Communist forces back to the northern limit of the country where the Yalu River serves to separate it from China. Then, in a surprise move the Chinese, labeling their forces “volunteers,”
crossed the Yalu in overwhelming numbers and drove the American and South Korean armies back to nearly the original line of demarcation where the war settled into a bloody stalemate.
There was heavy fighting in the air. Large numbers of the latest Soviet fighter, the MIG-15, flown for the most part by Russian pilots, challenged American control of the air. For American fighter pilots in Korea, the tour was 100 combat missions.
m
2 Feb 1952. Pittsburgh, en route. Los Medanos, one of those bars with a long mirror and nymphs etched on it. Officers and
cheap-looking women. The Belgian hatcheck girl, stunning
figure.
—I don’t think your friend is feeling very well, she said to Woody.
—Oh, he’s just puking, Woody said.
The hotel was in a square like a Spanish courthouse.
Rooms by the hour.
m
4 Feb 1952. I called Ann from Travis before we left. It was affec-tionate but stiff. Perhaps my fault as much as hers. Perhaps she wasn’t alone.
Hickam Field. I hardly remembered it. The warm air,
mynah birds calling as we sat in the terminal, debriefing and filling out white cards. The wooden BOQs along Worthing-ton, depressing as ever. I remembered coming into their
emptiness on afternoons when work ended.
Sitting in Wahine Kapu with Woody. Many nights here or
on the lanai with its smooth dance floor, card games in the
nipa huts all night long, dinner parties.
t h e f ly i n g y e a r s
43
Flying out again, over the brilliance of the beaches, the
dark sea. The vibration flows through the airplane from the
engines, playing every loose piece of metal. Hour after hour over the water, the sound of the engines seeming to rise and fall like the breath of a sick man through a critical night.
This endless struggle against the miles. The plane doesn’t
move evenly, but with little lurches against the uneven air. All along the fuselage, like an orchestra of metal insects, the loose pieces take up the tune.
6 Feb 1952. Tokyo. Snow. The Pearl House Hotel on Avenue B, three stories squeezed in between little shops. One bathroom, just off the lobby. Bar filled with GIs. In the room, dim bulbs, a gas burner for heat. Two pairs of slippers beneath the bed, one large, one small.
The cab finally comes. Miyoshi’s. Dark night, remote
neighborhood. Short path to the door. We’ve been drinking.
In stocking feet led to a room along a corridor. Whiskey is
brought. A few minutes later, a tapping on the door. Two girls enter, bowing. One has a samisen, plays and sings in a high
voice. In kimonos we go to the baths, sit naked on wooden
stools, the girls soaping us, Mitsiko and Hanako. Hard-ons
like horses’. All naked together in the water. Then they dry us.
—You rear gentermen.
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g o d s o f t i n
—We’re no gentlemen.
—Yes, yes. You are.
—No.
—You good captains, she insists.
—No, no good.
—No-good captains?
Sex on tatami mats. Smooth belly, little pubic hair.
In the baths the next morning at seven, sitting on the
warm floor, shaving. Soaking in the hot water. Cold, gray skies, smokestacks and black buildings. Singing You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.
Cab comes at exactly 0900. Drive to the station. The bill
at Miyoshi’s was 5,000 yen each.
Train to Nagoya and Iwakuni. Leaves on the dot. The
country is green and clear all the way from Tokyo to Nagoya.
Orange trees, tea bushes, rice stubble in the fields. We follow the sea as far as Atami skirting little fishing villages. Stations with concrete platforms, vendors selling oranges, candy, beer.
At ten that night we change to a troop sleeper, arrive at
Iwakuni at six in the morning. Dark, cold, clean-smelling air.
Remembering coming back to West Point by boat after the
Columbia or Notre Dame game, walking up the steep hill to
the Plain at this hour.
By truck through town. Lighted, empty streets. Across
river on bomb-damaged bridge to air base. Sound of an air-
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45
plane taking off. Dawn just breaking, buildings turning from black to gray. Sunday morning, all still.
12 Feb 1952. Korea. A bus came to take us to Kimpo from Seoul City. Drove along outskirts. Everything dirty and poor, cracked walls, rusted iron, grass roofs on many houses crowded close, streets unpaved. Ragged kids begging from soldiers. River
frozen, trees bare. A few old men had chopped holes in the ice to fish.
Watched a mission take off at K-14—two at a time, boom-
ing down the runway, then two more, and two more. Col.
Thyng was leading, north to the Yalu. A second squadron fol-
lowed. They streamed out, turning, disappearing into the
overcast.
Come now, and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none. We arrived in Korea, as it happened, on a gloomy day. It was February, the dead of winter, planes parked among sandbag revetments and
bitter cold lying over the field adding to the pall. Davis, the ranking American
ace—mythic word, ineffaceable—a
squadron commander, had just been shot down. With the ter-
rible mark of newness on us, we stood in the officers’ club and listened to what was or was not fact. We were too fresh to
make distinctions.
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g o d s o f t i n
F-86s taking off for a mission, Korean War
Davis was CO of the 334th Squadron. He had twelve kills.
He was leading B Flight. Col. Preston, the Group CO, was
leading the squadron. Near the Yalu, Davis dove on 15 MIGs
that were in a climb, got the leader and swung out to try to get another. He did but was hit with a 37mm just behind the
canopy before his wingman could call a break. He went down
in a slow turn, hit and burned.
The flags on the field were at half-mast. At the club they
were talking about MIGs, how good they were, how much bet-
ter than the 86 at altitude. Chuck Pratt had been shot down, we heard.
Walking back to quarters in the rain. Wet road, dark, cold.
—I’m not going to like it here, Woody muttered.
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47
m
We had come, it turned out, to join a sort of crude colonial life lived in stucco buildings in plain, square rooms, unadorned, with common showers and a latrine that even the wing commander shared.
We were there together for six months, cold winter morn-
ings with the weak sunlight on the hills, the silvery airplanes gliding forth like mechanical serpents not quite perfected in their movement and then forming on the runway amid rising
sound. In the spring the ice melted in the rivers and the willow Woody
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g o d s o f t i n
became green. The blood from a bloody nose poured down
over your mouth and chin inside the rubber oxygen mask. In
summer the locust trees were green and all the fields. It comes hauntingly back: silent, unknown lands; distant brown river, the Yalu, the line between two worlds.
m
Just as, they say, in North Africa during the war the thing to have immediately to hide your innocence was desert boots, so the first requirement of a pilot in Korea was a folding plastic-covered map of the long peninsula that projected down from
China into the Yellow Sea, the muddy Yalu its northern bor-
der, the spattering of numerous islands, and midway, the
enemy capital, Pyongyang. Over the area of North Korea we
drew a fan of lines, all converging on our base. This gave headings, especially to home. Arcs of distance crossed these vectors to show at a glance how far you had gone or had to go.
From the front lines, which crossed the country at the
waist, it was about two hundred miles, twenty-five minutes or so, to the river and only a few more to the enemy fields in
China, where we were forbidden to go. There was no struggle
for possession of the air. Like a backroom deal, that had
already been decided. The MIGs entered the sky over North
Korea at will, fought if they chose to, and went back to their fields. We were trying to exterminate the enemy, but even the
Detail from fighter pilot’s map of North Korea, the azimuth lines radiate from K-14, the home base, north to the Yalu River 200 miles away.
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g o d s o f t i n
boy who mows the lawn knows that you do not kill wasps one
by one, you destroy the nest. The nests, however, were not to be touched. Everything in between was contested.
m
20 Feb 1952. Early morning. Through the dirty window the sky pale blue with cirrus. Alarm clocks haven’t gone off. The P-51
reccy’s are on the runway, blasting their engines. They’re first off every morning. The RF-80s come later. The end of the
runway is only about three hundred yards away. Sparrows scurrying beneath the eaves giving their brittle calls.
Shaving in a pan of hot water that’s been on the stove all
Flight line at K-14: Planes are in sandbag revetments
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51
night, the water steaming as it hits the cold earth outside the door. Cracked mirror. Mess hall down the icy road. Shirt,
sweater, flight jacket. Air very cold, in it become instantly awake.
m
The first mission was taxiing out. The ships, some painted
with black-and-white zebra stripes, others with a solid band of yellow, moved along quickly, but they seemed strangely inept on the ground, rolling like cable cars or trolleys. A few of them had red stars stenciled under the cockpit rim. He saw the
pilots hunched inside, faceless and inhuman under the helmets and black oxygen masks.
They lined up in pairs on the runway, twelve ships alto-
gether. The engines were run up. The smoke shot backward
and skyward. A sustained roar filled the air, a deafening erup-tion, like an ultimate wind of flame. The noise was brutal, but deep and assuring. It seemed endless. The rear ships quivered in the river of blast. He watched the first two finally go, their rudders flicking slowly from side to side as they began to roll, like the tails of fish holding quietly against a current, rolling very slowly at the start and then quickening until they flowed down the far end of the runway and nosed into the sky. The
others followed at close interval.
m
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g o d s o f t i n
23 Feb 1952. First combat mission. Sightseeing tour, up to Long Dong, across the peninsula to Wonson, then home. Cold,
damp day. Bitter wind. Bones feeling brittle, nose running.
Somewhat nervous. Supposed to be Purple Two, the last
man, on MacDonald’s wing. Somehow mistook Griffith’s
plane for MacDonald’s and taxied out in wrong flight. Never
got it straightened out. Difficult to tell earth from sea. The frozen river mouths blended into the land. The sky clear and ominous. A few contrails. Passed head-on a returning
squadron of 86s. Frost forming on rear of canopy at 41,000
feet despite canopy heat. Rearview mirror missing. Spent time looking hard but not really focusing. Felt stuffed into cockpit, loaded with layers of clothing and equipment. The last ninety-nine missions, they say, are the hardest.
Squadron party that night at the enlisted mess. Walls used
as a blackboard for an English-Japanese course, grammar
chalke
d all over them. A band, steaks, beer, everyone shouldering one another in the smoke, shouting and singing. Col.
Thyng and Col. Preston, dutifully there, sitting quietly at one table.
m
The first morning light over the top of the wing. The first, easy missions. Out of the dust of memory, with a faint coating of dust himself, childlike, shrewd, comes Amell, the squadron
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53
commander . . . I don’t remember how I first saw him. He
remains fixed, in any event, as in a photograph, with a fur hat like a Cossack and a navy revolver in a holster under his arm.
He had a husky, somewhat thespian voice. As an actor his
speeches tended to be slightly long, although he could be suc-cinct on occasion . . . His eyes were bad. They used to say that if anyone had the chances Amell had, they would have shot
down ten airplanes—he ended up with three victories and a
wingman drenched in flame who went down one day near
Sinuiju. As I think now of his eyes, they seem to me small but like those of traders or old policemen, wise. In the air you heard his grating voice and assurance, like a man stepping
blithely into traffic looking the wrong way. He liked to drink and was given to extravagant gestures . . .
m
His first words to me that I recall were at a briefing. I was flying as his wingman on my second combat mission. The task
of wingman can be easily described: it is to stay with the leader and to look, especially behind—almost all danger comes from
there. I knew I was being tried out. I was ready for advice or words of warning. As the aircraft numbers were written next
to our names, he commented genially, “Great. You have old No Go, and I’ve got the Guzzler.” They were two of the oldest and slowest airplanes, but he didn’t have them changed.
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g o d s o f t i n
I was fearful as we climbed in the cold air, the planes
bobbing slightly. Perhaps it was the day I saw my first MIG, silver, passing above us, complete in every detail, silent as a shark. There were many in the air that day. They were coming from the north in flight after flight, above us. I remember
how helpless and alone I felt. My throat was burning as I
breathed.
m
3 March 1952. Fifth mission. Climbed north, going to 40,000